YOU JUST DO THE BEST YOU CAN

published in Texas Co-op Power magazine, March 2005

I can still see him sitting there, my father, on that scorching afternoon.  I perched on the towel-covered couch; he rested in his towel-covered recliner.  The air conditioner of his mobile home fought a losing battle with a cruel Texas heat baking through thin aluminum walls.

Two feet closer and our knees could have touched, mine as bony as his in our shared resemblance of long legs and angular frames.  My husband once horrified me by observing that with my hair pulled back, I looked just like my father, and it was years before I'd tie my hair back again.  No offense meant—my father was a handsome man, but I was not possessed of any desire to resemble a man, regardless of looks.  Yet now that my father is gone, I'd grab whatever chance I could get—to look like him, look at him, anything but the pallid choices left to me now: to seek him out in weakening memory, to listen for a voice I can barely hear.  To wish I had known him better.  To wish I had understood.

But that day my bony knees were occupied in holding up the cherub who was my daughter—my firstborn, the miracle that had me terrified of screwing up.  The afternoon was sweltering, the words between Daddy and me few as always.

And then he spoke the ones I will never, ever forget.  The ones that, after all the years of 'yes sir' and 'no sir' and turning myself inside out for his approval and then rebelling, at last made him—

Human.  Simply human.  Simply a father who hadn't, after all, known everything or even believed he did.  Who, despite all those pronouncements and orders and dictates and proscriptions, had not known any better than I the sure way to make them strong and healthy.  To keep them safe.

A man of the West, my father.  A lawman retired before his time when honor wouldn't let him bow before the altar of politics.  A man born a century too late.  John Wayne who felt too much and couldn't say it.  In my father's world, a real man didn't have feelings, much less show them. 

So I spent my life trying to make him proud of me and had no idea, for the first half of our years together, if I'd ever achieved it.  But after that day, the water of my new and startling perception wore away at the rock that was my image of my father.

Because what he said to me was this:  You care about them so much, and you never know if what you're doing is right.  You don't mean to do the wrong thing.  You just do the best you can.

Not a lot of words for some, but a raging torrent from him.  We both choked up and looked away, stalled out and ran scared.  But the apology I heard in those words was water on dry ground.  Dawn after a long night alone.  In those few sentences, I saw him at last, the man who had loved me since my first minute, the man who'd played with me years ago, who'd taught me how to dance and told a slumping almost-teen to stand straight and be proud that she was tall.  The man who'd wanted to do right by me every bit as much as I prayed to do right by the miracle grinning up from my lap.

And who'd known as little as I did about how to make that happen.  How to bestow perfect happiness and protection when every day, my control over her world would weaken.  With every stage of her growth, she would take another step out of the bubble I was trying to create.  I just didn't know it then.

But in the moment when he said those words, I realized that though I'd laid a thousand shortcomings at his door and knew everything about how he should change, I'd sold him short.  I'd been blind to the pearl inside the oyster when I'd assumed that every misstep between us was a result of his inability to understand or his perfect assurance that he was right and I was wrong.

Without the veil of youthful arrogance, I saw him for the first time as a kindred soul, a man who might have made mistakes but who also knew the terror of responsibility for a brand new soul.  In that instant, I looked at him with new eyes...and forgave.  Maybe he'd made mistakes but not out of malice.  He'd had the best of intentions, tried to do the right thing, just as I was fumbling to do now.  It was a moment of clarity as is seldom granted in this life.  I wish I'd told him, never mind that neither of us might have survived the gaffe.  He ran from emotion as though a poison cloud, and I was too unsure of myself, too shocked by this new knowledge.  My father, vulnerable.  I couldn't find my voice.

I hope he knew.  After that day, I tried to put more into words, even knowing he would squirm.  Toward the end of his life, he got better at saying them, too.  Not good, no.  Not facile or glib.  He was a man who felt too deeply and those feelings often choked him.  But at least I matured enough to know that he felt them, and he relaxed enough to try to speak, choked or not.  I'll thank him forever for that.  I lost him years too soon, but when the end came so unexpectedly, I had the consolation that on a hot and surprising afternoon, he had opened a door and let each of us slide fingers out into a brave new world.  And because he spoke those crucial words, hands that had missed making contact for years finally brushed.

We said more words after that day, though not nearly enough.  If I'd known I'd lose him without warning, I'd have tried harder to say them all.  I needed him longer than I had him, but I did know that he loved me and that he knew I loved him.  Our missteps didn't end, but forgiveness softened a lot of falls.

He cared deeply, and so did I.  We didn't do it all right.  We never meant to do it wrong.

You just do the best you can.    

© 2005 Jean Brashear